La Cenerentola is Rossini’s adorable rendering into music of Perrault’s fairy tale Cinderella. It is one of his most popular works and its particular charm stems from the fact that unlike in The Barber of Seville, written exactly one year before, the zany humour blends with a tenderness, delicacy and melancholy that is perfectly in keeping with the quiet, dreamy heroine, in spite of the genre description of the opera as “dramma giocoso”. Thus, the story and the characters in La Cenerentola are far more finely differentiated than what audiences had grown accustomed to in Rossini’s early farces and comedies. Even the music, inspired by the work’s subtitle La bontà in trionfo (The Triumph of Goodness), breathes with a new spirit of sensitivity.

The role of Angelina has of long been Cecilia Bartoli’s visiting card through-out the entire world. But for this new production in Salzburg it was her heartfelt desire to make use for the first time of the knowledge acquired by the specialists of historic performance practice and have it performed on period instruments. Furthermore, it has been her dream to find a form of staging that brings out the contrasting elements of this opera adequately. French conductor Jean-Christophe Spinosi and his period orchestra Ensemble Matheus have already played in notable performances of other Rossini operas and producer Damiano Michieletto created a series of highly acclaimed stagings at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro.